The Girl Tv Reporter Michael Nicholson Brought to Britain, Adopted As His Daughter...But Didn't Write a Book About ; He's Famous for Rescuing a Girl From War-Torn Bosnia...Now the Other Daughter He Found in the Slums of Brazil Tells How Her Life in Britain has Brought Loneliness and Heartache

Mail on Sunday › June 15, 2008

Linked as:

Summary

VETERAN ITN correspondent Michael Nicholson won praise and admiration when he adopted a nine-year-old orphan girl from war- ravaged Bosnia. He wrote movingly of their close relationship in the acclaimed bestseller Natasha's Story, on which the award-winning film Welcome To Sarajevo was based. Today, though, The Mail on Sunday reveals that Mr Nicholson has a second adopted daughter from his travels - rescued this time from the slums of Brazil. But in contrast to the highly publicised and apparently successful adoption of Natasha, Ana Sliva Mattias has remained unknown to all but his closest friends and family. And, sadly, despite his generosity in giving her a new life, their relationship has now all-but broken down. Ana has today decided to tell her remarkable story for the first time, speaking honestly about her problems adapting to life in Britain, in the impassioned hope of a reconciliation with the father she once idolised. She was a wide-eyed girl of eight when Mr Nicholson first encountered her in the summer of 1996. He was reporting for ITN on the desperately impoverished street children of Sao Paulo, where she was scavenging to survive. Hardened from covering 15 conflicts during his 25-year career, he was still visibly saddened by Ana's plight. Determined to help her, he ignored professional protocol and flew her to Britain for vital medical treatment at huge personal expense. Mr Nicholson and his family looked after her as she recovered from the operation, then decided to adopt her. They enrolled her in a private school and provided her with what they hoped was enough emotional and financial security to put her traumatic past behind her. Yet for all the Nicholsons' generosity, and for all her seeming good fortune, things have not turned out well for the 19-year-old. Today she is a single mother, living not in the Nicholsons' sprawling Georgian home in Haslemere, Surrey, but in a single rented room at a nearby YMCA. She has spent the past three years flitting from hostel to hostel, racking up debts and acquiring drug habits. Father and daughter have not spoken for two-and-ahalf-years. She accuses him of neglecting her, while he says she moved out of her own accord. Both now express a desire to be reunited, and the corrosion of their relationship to this degree must be a source of anguish for Mr Nicholson. It is not as if he was new to the difficult business of adopting a foreign child when he took in Ana. Four years earlier, while on assignment in Sarajevo, he had smuggled nine-year-old orphan Natasha Mihaljcic out of the country and adopted her. In Natasha's Story, he told in detail how, over the years, she had slotted seamlessly into his family, bonding with his wife, Diana, and their two sons, William and Tom. Perhaps he came to regret the publicity because Ana's adoption was kept secret - until now, at least. 'I had an amazing bond with Dad and I will always love him,' she says. 'I was a Daddy's girl and he meant everything to me. I regret the way I behaved when I was younger and the mistakes I made. 'But I'm angry with him as well as myself. He has to recognise that he has another daughter, and now a grandson. I need his support more than ever and I wish we could go back to the fatherdaughter relationship we once shared.' Articulate and unnervingly honest, Ana has experienced both extreme poverty and privilege in the course of her short lifetime. Shaking with nerves, her turquoise eyes mist with tears as she speaks of her love for her adoptive father. Her natural father, she was told, had been a drug trafficker and her mother had abandoned her at birth. Brought up by her 65-year-old grandmother, Donna Maria, the pair ate from bins and scraped a living in Sao Paulo selling cardboard boxes they picked up off the filthy streets. 'Home' was a cel- lar. Surrounded by crack addicts and slum gangsters, Ana was trapped in a hand-to-mouth existence with almost no chance of survival. Shootings were a fact of life. She was given drugs to hide in her underwear when the police were around. Disease had robbed her of her left eye and she was suffering from a rare form of spina bifida. A lack of nerve cells in her back meant she was unable to control her bowels. Desperately malnourished and needing an operation her grandmother could not afford, she was facing an early death when she met Mr Nicholson. 'At first I was scared,' she remembers. 'I'd never seen a white person before. But he shook my hand and gave me sherbet- coated sweets. A Brazilian journalist called Jan Rocha [who had put Michael in contact with Donna Maria] helped interpret, and he promised he'd be back the next day.' Michael kept his word and by the time he had finished filming a few days later he had acquired Ana's trust. 'He seemed very interested in my life and felt sorry for me,' she recalls. A few months later, Michael suggested she came to England where he would pay for the lifesaving operation to enlarge her bowel. She would stay with him while she recovered. 'My grandmother explained it was the best thing for me to do,' says Ana. 'She must have been putting on a brave face, because if I'd seen her upset I would not have wanted to go. As it was I was excited.' Jan drove her to the airport, and she was met at Heathrow by Mr Nicholson and his wife, and driven to their home. They threw away her tatty clothes, gave her shoes - her first ever pair - and her own bedroom. 'They gave me a pink nightie and a pink fluffy robe,' she recalls. 'I slept in a bed for the first time. It was heaven.' Through pointing and hand gestures, she got to know her new family. 'Michael treated me like an adorable baby girl,' she says. 'Diana wasn't as friendly, but then she hadn't had as much time to get to know me.' Her arrival also meant a sister for Natasha, who was then 15, and had little in common with the couple's sons, Tom and Will, both in their 20s at the time. 'I gave her someone closer to her own age to bond with,' she says. 'Michael told me what had happened to her. He told me more about his job as well. I got more excited about seeing him on television than the rest of the family, who'd got used to it. I'd stay up late to watch his news reports.' Six months into her stay, Ana had her operation at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London, paid for by donations from Mr Nicholson friends and family. After a month she was discharged and began a slow recovery, encouraged by Mr Nicholson. Slowly, she learned to speak English. 'My first words were to Dad: "Cheeky little monkey." He was always tickling me and Diana taught me to say them. 'He taught me to hold a pen, and to read and write. He took me on walks to help me build up my strength, and taught me to sail. I went for drives in his Bentley, too. He said it was red, but it was pink really. 'And we loved watching black-andwhite films. I soon built up a strong bond with him. He became my world and I loved him to bits.' Michael enrolled Ana into St Bartholomew's Primary School for Girls, the same school Natasha had attended. 'Although we got on well it wasn't a sibling-type relationship,' she says. 'Natasha would do her own thing with her friends. We were very different. She had come from war and I'd come from poverty. 'We didn't automatically get on just because we'd both been taken in by Dad. Because Tom and Will were older I only really saw them at family gatherings.' Nonetheless, in December 1998 Michael decided to adopt Ana. 'I fitted so well into the family that one day, when he picked me up from school in his Bentley, he asked if I wanted to join them for good. I was thrilled,' she says. By all accounts, she had a charmed upper middle- class lifestyle, with lunches by the family swimming pool in summer and generous presents for birthdays and Christmas. At 11 she was enrolled at the girlsonly Royal Grammar School in Guildford, where she excelled at lacrosse, swimming, ballet and drama. 'I made friends easily. Dad said I was naturally talented and that he was proud of me.' Michael would return from jobs abroad laden with gifts for his children. 'My favourite was a teddy bear he bought from America, that I named Yankee Doodle,' she says. 'And once, when he was making a documentary on Christopher Reeve, he took me to the studio in London where I watched him do the voiceover. I was so proud.' Yet family life was not without its complications. Diana, who as a housewife stayed home to look after the children, was clearly closer to Natasha than Ana, having had four years to bond before the Brazilian girl arrived. By the time Ana reached 13, it began to bother her. 'When Dad was away - which was often - I used to feel left out,' she says. 'The only time Diana would talk to me was when she was annoyed with Natasha.' Growing introverted, she started to question her life back in Brazil. 'I felt like I didn't belong. When he was home I'd snap at him for silly things and ask him why he'd bothered to bring me to Britain,' she says. 'I must have sounded ungrateful, but really, I just wanted to discover my past.' She was told her mother had been uncontactable, and she didn't know whether her grandmother was alive or dead. She would often run away, sometimes for hours, sometimes days at a time. 'I'd turn up late for school or go and stay with friends,' she says. 'Sometimes Dad had to call the police. When I got back he'd say he was disappointed in me. It was worse than a punishment. I hated the thought of letting him down and I vowed to behave myself.' There was worse to come, however. At 15 she was found to be having a relationship with one of the school's 18-year-old classroom supervisors. He was sacked and she was expelled. Michael arranged for her to go to Guildford College to study child care the following year. 'He was devastated, but I'd begun to grow resentful about how overprotective he was,' she says. 'Having seen everything horrible there was to see in Brazil I didn't see what harm Turn to Page 18 .. could come to me walking home in the dark.' She started stealing from her parents, something she now very much regrets. 'I'd take the odd [pounds]20 to buy sweets and cigarettes,' she admits. 'They grew suspicious and started searching my bag. Sometimes they caught me but I wasn't punished. I just got the "disappointed" speech.' Meanwhile, Natasha graduated with a diploma in sports science. And her profile was raised further when she revisited the Sarajevo orphanage from which she had been smuggled. But Ana's very existence was kept under wraps by Michael. 'I'd like to think he was protecting my privacy,' she says. 'He was protective over Natasha, too, and her coverage hadn't always been good. 'I couldn't talk to Natasha about how I felt. She was Little Miss Perfect ??

and had never got into trouble.' Ana, however, sank deeper. She used the money she stole to buy cannabis, and started self-harming. 'The first time I cut myself I was 14. It was after an argument with Dad,' she says. 'He slammed a door in anger and a picture frame with a photo of me inside fell from the wall and smashed. 'I used the glass to cut my arms. He made me go for counselling but I dropped out. 'I smoked cannabis because it was an escape from the depression I felt. I don't think my parents suspected. Drugs didn't belong in my family so they wouldn't think of looking out for them.' She left home shortly before her 16th birthday, in June 2005, after another argument with Michael. 'I wanted to go to the cinema with my boyfriend of the time, a woodwork student, but he said I couldn't,' she recalls. 'I started screaming and he changed his mind.'

See the full content of this document

Extract

The Girl Tv Reporter Michael Nicholson Brought to Britain, Adopted As His Daughter...But Didn't Write a Book About ; He's Famous for Rescuing a Girl From War-Torn Bosnia...Now the Other Daughter He Found in the Slums of Brazil Tells How Her Life in Britain has Brought Loneliness and Heartache

When she stormed past his office on her way out he called her in. 'He said that he and Diana were terrified that they'd lost me. 'Then he said he wanted me to meet a woman he knew who ran an orphanage in Sao Paulo. He said I could earn my way working for her,...

See the full content of this document